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Month: March 2017

It feels like we have covered a lot of the major beginner things and that we are moving in on helpful details now. Like the fact that having increasing your web pages loading time can help cut your bounce rate. As I thought on the concept, it totally made sense since I have realized I stopped using certain sites over others because they took forever to load or use.

I was glad to help in class today when it came to Display URLs versus Destination URLs. It seemed really small and simple to me at first, but after some people had trouble with it in class I saw how it could be confusing, so I was glad to be of help. Especially after all the other things I have learned from people and their own experiences in class. This is quite a great setting and pattern to learn about building and running a web business, since we can all benefit from each other’s learning. It was also relieving to hear that starting by learning adwords is a great base as many aspects of it relate to the other versions like SEO and Social.

Although it wasn’t the topic of the day, I was very happy we took a moment to talk about networking and some more advanced tactics we could use to accomplish it. I have noticed that I have far more success using current connections to get jobs, but none of my current contacts are connected to what I might eventually end up doing, so this conversation was another motivator for me to start working on a network now to prepare for the future to make things easier on myself. Plus it was helpful to hear that I should not be afraid to list things I am interested in to show that I can be a good fit for a workplace.

Although my current project is using an advertisement model, it was good to learn about ROI and how it is definitely something you can plan for to an extent. It was cool to see the excel sheet that showed how if you can increase your CTR you can increase overall ROI. Plus, learning about some of the tricky ways you can track conversions was enlightening for future projects.

I am glad we learned about how to manage individual keywords and their quality scores, as I have very quickly put that information to work. I thought I it might be safe to leave a keyword with a low score going until it gets better, but I have learned that is not a very safe approach because of how important quality score is and the downward spiral that can happen if my overall quality scores are not handled correctly.

Right as I was starting to wonder how I could get more data on who visited my site and how, we covered analytics, so I was happy with the timing. While adwords is on a day-long delay with clicks/etc, it is nice to know that I can have moment to moment accuracy with visitors and more with google analytics.

It seems like in using adwords you are constantly dancing the line between specific words that still offer a good level of impressions. But having the general rule of only keeping keywords that have a CTR above 1% seems really helpful in curating all my keywords. Plus negative keywords will help make sure I am being seen for the right reasons.

I do not believe I will need to need to have more than one campaign for this project, but I am likely to have many ad groups. It was new but unsurprising information to me that google has its own values, like not displaying ads about guns, considering both their reputation to uphold and locational values they likely hold.

I found it helpful to quickly distinguish that home pages can be landing pages, but not every landing page is a home page, especially since many will come to my site for particular articles straight from the ad.

This was a great week for learning about Adwords, like the fact that Adwords can automatically spread out my ads according to my budget so that they can be seen all day by more people rather than just early birds. Another huge addition for me is that I can do different ad groups just for pages, which I think is how I’ll get most of my clicks. People will usually be looking for the information included in my articles since I am just getting off the ground, rather than people coming to me directly for their news.

Quality score is not something I’ve heard of before but it makes since, especially since this is advertising is how google makes most of its money. Hearing the term “gamify” today in class was interesting since I have started to see it or things nearly synonymous to it from different sources recently, plus it definitely makes sense.

After reviewing all the legal-eese about starting and running online businesses, I think I know what I want to do. For this class I will just keep myself as a Sole Proprietor. If I ever do something entrepreneurial in the future however, I will definitely go with an LLC, since that seems to be a best of both worlds in many cases. But for now SP works for me since I doubt I’ll make any money to cover the initial cost of an LLC, among other things.

I am so happy you mentioned pixabay.com, as I have used it since the class for both my site and work in other classes in trying to quickly find royalty-free images. It was also nice to finally know the difference between copyright and trademarks, with copyrights being quite simple and trademarks taking actual legal work.

I realized this week that I have a leg up of sorts in designing my site. In addition to using Wix that helps with making your site look modern, I am taking Comm 125 (visual fundamentals) which is helping me know how to properly form the layout to be visually pleasing. I plan on using those principles in my site so make it both conventional and credible.

As I have been doing research for my site I started by looking at large game review sites, but I think switching my focus to smaller ones would be better since that is what my site will be, a simple site with a smaller amount of articles run by one person (myself). I am hoping to use wix’s automatic plugins to add donate button to my site so that I can potentially make money off advertising and donations.

Talking about domains and hosting this week has emphasized the point that we need to define our priorities as soon as possible. When we know if we want flexibility or power in our web builder, it really helps narrow down what direction you want to go in and who to choose to help you do that.

A sneaky trick we talked about this week is that you can buy domains similar to your competition, so that people are more likely to be sent to your site and so it’s harder for your competition to grow.

I am going to try and use my host as my web builder so I can keep everything under one roof and not have to worry about switching my domain to someone else. It seems like a pain because whoever you got your domain from doesn’t want you leaving their business. It is a greedy capitalist move that makes total sense, but I would rather not have to deal with it.

This week a focus was potential business models for our websites. When we started talking about different models, I realized I was already using an affiliate to find deals on amazon. kinja deals is a blog style site that constantly posts some of the best deals on amazon in one place for people to see. Then you use their link to jump on a deal and helped make them some money, I think that is quite an interesting approach to business.

The idea that “if something is easy for you to do, it’s easy for everyone else” is something I find very important in being successful online. That is why it is helpful to find a niche for our business and make our ads competitive. I just need to avoid mixing an affiliate model with reviews.

Process: I started by taking some pictures with one of my class groups of us doing regular brainstorming work on a whiteboard. After choosing which picture I wanted to use I decided that I wanted to focus on the pen Abi is holding in the picture. I thought it would be fun to make it a magic pen, so I looked up some tutorials on how to do glowing lines. While they didn’t come out quite as “glowy” as expect, I was pleased regardless. I threw in the names of everyone in the group, with our fourth member not featured in the picture being listed as the “producer/director”. I especially like the font I found for the logo, dafont.com is quickly becoming a favorite place of mine. I wanted the colored lines to be whimsical, but the background be a bit foreboding as it contributes to the supposed plot of the movie.